There are such things is meant to disrupt and challenge what you have always believed. There are such things leads you to think twice that that bump in the night is just the wind rattling the shutters and to scold yourself for thinking it could be anything but because, just for a second, you believed it was something that you couldn’t explain, something dark and unknown, something that would completely change everything you knew to be true. Changed what you knew about yourself.
Read MoreThe pills will keep me safe, it's implied. They don't stop the lights from dancing off the coffee at 10 pm and shining into my eyes as I get a little help to keep the sleep away. It's not what they were prescribed for anyway: No one thought I wasn't just a depressed person.
Read MoreI always feared I would die with a face of porcelain with no evidence of a life lived. No wrinkles by my mouth from too many smiles, no lines framing my eyes from too many days spent squinting in the warm sun. A few months back, I met a man and I saw in his face the lines of a journey. I saw a life. The first night we met, we walked around lower Manhattan for far too long so said the blisters on my feet.
Read MoreSome might think New York City is an odd oasis from California, but undisturbed subway rides allowed my mind to wander the way it never could in Los Angeles traffic. I was in my 20s, relatively young to my transplant to New York City, when I rode the subway half a dozen times a day for multiple part-time jobs. I worked with patients in community mental health clinics throughout the city, and with this hectic schedule, the subway afforded me an ironic luxury of being lost in my thoughts.
Read MoreIt’s been ten years since The Fountain was released. It wasn’t too long after the movie first came out that you mentioned it. You’ve been referencing it ever since—a conquistador here, a queen there—only I didn’t know, because I hadn’t seen it.
Read MoreMaybe it all began one late Tuesday night during summer vacation. You didn’t have to be up early, but your parents did, so you stayed up late to watch re-runs of The Cosby Show alone, but wound up catching Shannon Tweed doing her thing on Cinemax.
Read MoreIt was raining and I was sitting in the backseat of my mother’s grey Buick, watching the water cascade down the window like someone else’s sorrow splayed for me to notice. Already, I understood isolation and the pain that comes with not belonging, and the understanding that comes when others see you as a monster, a thing, a weirdness in the world. I was five-years-old, waiting for my sister to rush into our car excitedly from school. I begrudgingly went to nursery school, crying every morning. If you asked me why I feared other children so much, I could not tell you. I still cannot.
Read MoreWhen I started dating my partner, we were both dating other people. And no, we weren’t cheating. We were, and still are, polyamorous.
Read MoreWhen you’re six, new to a country, morphed into this thing called “foreigner,” you don’t know what culture is, just that everything you do is wrong and everything that was once so easy and comfortable only brings pain and embarrassment. At birth, culture is family (mine was one of indulgent love). Then you’re uprooted and there’s the schoolyard, of teachers who mostly don’t care, of children who have no skills at compassion—they’re trying so hard themselves, to understand, to fit in. In school—that’s when I begin to fall more and more into an anxious state of observation.
Read MoreI stood naked in front of the bathroom mirror. I couldn’t look away. My breast buds were sad little stubs above my rounded belly. My glasses left a raw red mark on the bridge of my nose. My nose and forehead were shiny, my hair scraped back into a ponytail. I had never been a pretty child.
Read MoreAs I sat there feeling a familiar ache inside me, an old memory came to me, without my calling, often like these memories do. I must have been ten or twelve years old in the memory, and I could see myself in my maternal grandmother’s house. I used to often spend my summer vacations with my maternal relatives. I guess my parents needed some time off me, as I did off them. I wouldn’t mind spending the days there, as it meant no more evenings full of terror-filled waiting as I dreaded the sound of the doorbell and the state my father would walked in, and the fights between my parents that followed. I felt invisible and doomed.
Read MoreI had my suspicions growing up, but they never bothered me enough to mention it. At the age of eighteen, I met my biological mother for the first time at a Denny’s restaurant in my hometown. Prior, a friend of my eventual mother-in-law stopped by to visit, and on this summer evening, we discovered through a depth of conversation that she was my aunt. I felt astounded, and rather nervous as she laid out a story of hurtful feelings, broken dreams, and painful abandonment.
Read MoreI just turned 40. Everyone said this is the year I would feel liberated and alive. I was recently divorced from a physically abusive man and was starting a new and exciting life for myself…until I got knocked up by a much younger man.
Read MoreWhen a healthy person wakes up from a good night’s sleep, they feel refreshed and ready to take on the world. When I wake up from eight hours of mostly interrupted sleep, my bladder’s burning, my abdomen hurts, my joints are achy…my whole body could use another eight hours of sleep, maybe even a whole week, maybe even a lifetime if it were up to me. I don’t get up from bed, I crawl out; at least that’s how it feels—arduous, strenuous.
Read MoreAt 17, I gave away my virginity to my ex-Mormon, pre-crackhead boyfriend with the words, “if you’re going to do this you should use a condom.” I grew tired of saying no. His desires were stronger than my boundaries. I chose to love through sacrifice.
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